Kirk Gould, a performance consultant with Pinnacle West Capital, talked about business processes and metrics. I like his definition of a metric: “A tool created to tie the performance of the organization to the business objectives”, and he had lots of great advice about how to — and how not to — develop metrics that work for your company.
I came right off of my presentation before this one, so I’m a bit too juiced up to focus as well on his presentation as it deserves. However, his slides are great and I’ll be reviewing them later. He also has a good handout that takes us through the 10 steps of metric development:
- Plan
- Perform
- Capture
- Analyze
- Display
- Level
- Automate
- Adjust
- Manage
- Achieve
He has a great deal more detail for each of these steps, both on the handout and in his presentation. He discussed critical success factors and performance indicators, and how they fit into a metrics framework, but the best parts were when he described the ways in which you can screw up your metrics programs: there were a lot of sheepish chuckles and head-shaking around the room, so I know that many of these hit home.
He went through the stages of metrics maturity, which I’ll definitely have to check out later since he flew through the too-dense slides pretty quickly. He quotes the oft-used (and very true) line that “what gets measured, gets managed”, a concept that is at the heart of metrics.